Adopting the System
A new website of the Network is set up in seven steps. None of them changes the shared package; a site is a configuration of the system, not a copy of it. A team that has read the Page Patterns and the Standards for Sites before beginning will find the steps short.
Step 1: Register the site
Add the site to the network list in the shared package, as a department or a service, so that it appears in the footer of every other site under the right heading.
Step 2: Create the app
Copy the layout of an existing site into a new workspace under apps. The layout wraps every page in the SiteShell and imports the shared stylesheet. Nothing else is copied; pages are written afresh.
Step 3: Describe the site
Fill in the site configuration: name, short name, domain, contact address and the wordmark eyebrow. Add the navigation submenus and footer links. Every page the site will carry appears in both.
Step 4: Set the colours
Override the brand-50 to brand-950 tokens and the accent token in the site's stylesheet, after importing the shared one. Leave the ink, line, mist and steel tokens as they are, and change the link token only to preserve contrast.
Step 5: Add the standard pages
Every site carries Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Accessibility Statement and Copyright Information, rendered from the shared page components. The copyright page lists the photographers named in the site's captions.
Step 6: Compose the content pages
Build the remaining pages from the patterns, using the shared components and plain prose. Photographs are local files with a credit; the site never links to images elsewhere.
Step 7: Check and publish
Run the type check and lint for the site and carry out the review under Standards for Sites. When both pass, the site is deployed on its .gov.vin domain.
What a site sets and what it inherits. The division below is fixed. A site that finds itself wanting to change something in the right-hand column has found a need for a proposal to the shared package, not a reason to depart from it.
| Element | Responsibility | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Name, short name, domain and contact address | Set by the site | Site configuration |
| Wordmark eyebrow and connective | Set by the site | Site configuration |
| Navigation submenus and footer page links | Set by the site | Site configuration |
| Brand scale and accent | Set by the site | Site stylesheet |
| Link colour | Set by the site, only to preserve contrast | Site stylesheet |
| Photographs and captions | Set by the site | Public images folder; page source |
| Prose and structured content | Set by the site | Page source |
| Banner, masthead, footer and skip link | Inherited | Shared package |
| Typefaces, type scale and letter-spacing | Inherited | Shared package |
| Ink, line, mist and steel tokens | Inherited | Shared stylesheet |
| Components and their appearance | Inherited | Shared package |
| Standard pages | Inherited, with the site's name and address | Shared package |
| Motion and reduced motion behaviour | Inherited | Shared package |
After adoption. A site is rebuilt against each release of the shared package and reviewed again; the procedure is under Release Notes. The values a site's colours must achieve are recorded under Design Tokens, and the tokens themselves are described under Colours.
Questions about the procedure may be sent to contact@design.gov.vin.